After Tonight
by martianwitchery
Summary: "The sky that night suggested a universal victory as nature's lights seemed to open their bright hearts in a rare truce with civilization's lights below." Yusei/Aki. (tw: implied self-harm)


"I know that after tonight, you won't have to look up at the stars, no, no, no, no,

I know, by the end of tonight, we'll be looking down upon them from heaven…" –"After Tonight" by Justin Nozuka

* * *

><p>The sky that night suggested a universal victory as nature's lights seemed to open their bright hearts in a rare truce with civilization's lights below. Aki demanded of her eyes that they stay on the road, but every now and then they strayed above to catch sight of a star in the field of vision lightly tinted by her visor. Her motor and wheels moved her faster through the streetlight scenery than her legs ever could, faster than her head could even think. Her breath rode upon the waves of air that sliced past the skin her suit left exposed, and the wind teased tendrils of her bangs out from the burgundy frame of her helmet. She felt like she was tearing straight through the pages of this storybook night, leaving a paper trail that documented her rightful existence in it. In all actuality she was trailing behind her companion, but there was something poignantly serene about a self-induced solitude, especially such an inoffensively small taste of one. It was a sentiment that she had yet to fully shake off.<p>

"Aki?" A voice and a change in the light from her D-Wheel's screen sent a static pulse through her heart and brought her back into the moment.

"Yeah?" she answered, glancing down at the image glowing up at her of Yusei.

"Just checking in. I couldn't see you all the way back there," Yusei replied.

Aki found herself faced with three different directions in which she could take their exchange. She could attempt a retort in regards to their respective speeds such as, "Is that a challenge?" but she doubted if the tone in his voice called for it. She could comment on how he "always had to be the leader," but she hesitated to sound so confrontational. She could even tease him by asking something like, "Oh, so you were looking for me?" but she blushed at the thought of receiving a legitimate response as she knew Yusei would give.

She decided to neither attack nor defend, but to react naturally. "I'm here," she responded somewhat belatedly.

"Good," he concluded with an almost artful simplicity before returning his attention to the road and ending the transmission.

Aki sighed a sigh that immediately joined the current of air as it flowed into oblivion. Putting on a charade was another habit she had not yet fully broken. Nevertheless, she recognized the feeling of the impulsive smile that was giving shape to her mouth, and on that high note she revved her machine a few feet forward. The delightful absence of a sudden lurching sensation in her stomach assured her that her handle on the controls was actually improving. Having set her gaze on the navy body encircled in red that was Yusei in front of her, she immediately noticed the right turn his vehicle seemed to be taking. She glanced down at the display of devices below her, then back up at Yusei, who had officially left the ramp at the oncoming right exit and had slowed down considerably while waiting for her to do the same.

_Maybe that _was_ a challenge_, she thought to herself as she crossed two of her fingers and prepared to steer. For a heartbeat's span of time her D-Wheel seemed to flirt with the asphalt, but the fancy quickly passed as the road before her once again ran straight.

"Are you okay, Aki?" She jumped at the sudden address. Yusei's face returned to her monitor, but she swore to herself that she was not going to dare look in any direction except forward until her compacted fingers and widened eyes relaxed.

"Sure!" she answered, looking up at Yusei on the road instead of down at him on the screen, a situation that did nothing to help her reclaim her sense of balance. A one- or two-note murmur of a laugh that Aki almost lost to the sounds of the road hummed from her speakers. From her pounding chest, she let out another exhaust of air that ended up sounding less like a sigh and more like a laugh in return. She stretched and wiggled her fingers in place, then assumed a grip on the handlebars that actually allowed blood to circulate to her fingertips again. Her head seemed to resume its normal functions as well, for an overdue thought occurred to her. "Yusei, where exactly are we going?" she inquired as she faced him again, essentially.

"Nowhere in particular," he replied. Aki looked at him attentively, waiting to hear the rest. The curious expression he offered in return indicated to her that he was already finished explaining.

"Ah," she chimed back, nodding her head in recognition. _Of course_.

As her eyes lingered downward, the road took an unforeseen dip, and Aki quickly fumbled at the controls to slow her vehicle against the powerful impression of gravity. The result was her D-Wheel catching up to Yusei's much sooner than she expected. She shot him a glance that expressed a notion of, "Fancy meeting you here," and he sent back that same glance tinted in cobalt instead of amber as he raised his visor. He then made an attempt at coercing her eyes into looking out in front of them by doing so himself. Her eyes followed, having no reason to question his request.

Immediately Aki acknowledged that her helmet was an unacceptable obstruction. She wrested it from her head as if it was cutting off her air supply and she was fighting for life.

The sky and sea at the pier glowed in harmonic parallel, sparkling with more colors than she ever found as a child digging for gemstones and gold in her mother's jewelry box. Ships lingered in the water like spirits, their interiors blacked out but their white sides illuminated by the lights strung across the bridge. The one break in the vision was a thin strip of dark wood that dragged itself far out into the water, cradled in a railing more easily jumped over than slipped through, though the structure's height rendered both actions irrational. Whether it was gravity continuing to push behind her or inertia beginning to pull her forward, she could not define—physics was one of _his_ strengths, not hers—but she felt herself flying further into the scene without a moment's movement.

"We're going there?" she asked, still staring at the "there" in question.

"Do you want to?" he asked back. Aki tucked her helmet under her arm and heaved herself onto the handlebars, emulating an excited child moments away from her first bike ride. "Helmet," Yusei reminded, intrigued by just how elated she was showing that she could become.

"Yeah, helmet," she agreed, nearly _dropping_ her helmet as she hurried to slide her head back into its violet red shell. The two riders broke off from their standstill at an even pace, and within minutes they had docked their D-Wheels—and helmets—at the inland edge of the pier.

The chilled breezes that skirted across the water immediately proved to contrast with the sauna under the padding of Aki's riding suit. She began a back-and-forth negotiation with her zipper, eventually letting it slide down to her waist and tying the gloved sleeves there as well, in turn employing the bust of her standard mahogany dress (that she silently praised herself for wearing underneath) to keep her modest. The red lines of her Claw mark stood out bluntly against the light skin of her right arm as she stretched the joints of both arms behind her back. Yusei wordlessly agreed with her about the temperature and left his gloves draped over the seat of his D-Wheel.

As the silence persisted, Aki grew more and more conscious of everything: the clunk of their footsteps against the wood and the separate sequences they followed, the sweat still drying on the back of her neck, the distance they were moving away from their vehicles. The enormity of the ocean was beginning to make her feel less dazzled and more cautious. She tried to reject it, but anxiety was brewing in the chemicals of her head. She shamefully anticipated her reunion with the machine that let her run at an escapist's speed.

The shift in her manner did not escape Yusei's attention to detail. Aki's expression was molded in the same enthusiasm that had sprung across her features before, but it was draining, leaving only the lines of a smile and the shapes of brightened eyes. She clutched at her arm, her fingers spreading as if they could intertwine with the talons depicted in her Sign. He had watched her act this way numerous times back at the garage. She would slowly abate her participation in the conversation and resign herself to watching the others as they only talked more, folding herself into the background like origami and smiling as if she were stuck. Watching her work to obtain her D-Wheel license, however, he had seen muted aspects of Aki's personality find voice, such as her spirit, her humility, and her focus. These had all impressed him; but what had startled him was the absence she had still felt of a true connection with her friends, himself included. When he, Jack, and Crow presented her with the collaborative finished product of her D-Wheel, she had wiped away quick tears, and he had noticed. He wondered how often they were so ready to fall.

Yusei decisively parked his feet at a random point of the pier, planting his hands firmly on the railing and facing out towards the distant city. Aki stopped in her tracks, her eyes briefly lit by a flash of surprise.

"It wasn't long ago that this was just a pile of planks jutting out from the sand," he began, patting the iron bar he was leaning on. "We used to sail paper boats off the shore nearby and wonder if any of them made it to Neo Domino."

"Wow," Aki replied, looking out at the expansive pier and trying to compare it to the twig of a bridge she had seen from the hill, stretching her imagination further to envision it as a neglected piece of washed-over woodwork. She placed her hand on the railing as well and connected it in her mind to the idea of growth.

"Now instead of paper boats, it's full of freight liners and cruise ships," Yusei added, fully aware that he sounded like a nostalgic old man.

Aki's smile deepened. The wind kicked her bangs closer to the stars, but she caught a lock and ran it between her fingertips, wrapping the end around her index finger like the string of a balloon.

"I remember looking at the ocean when I was really little and wondering when Papa was going to take me to see Satellite. He didn't quite know how to just say 'no' because whenever he tried to tell me something negative about Satellite, I'd tell him something negative about Neo Domino. If he said 'crime,' I'd point out some headline in the newspaper about crime in our city. If he said 'trash,' I said 'traffic.' If he said that he had work to do in the city, I'd say that if he left the city, he wouldn't have to do any work." She let the lock of hair slip free and watched the wind claim it. "There isn't really any reasoning with a determined child."

"That's definitely true," Yusei reinforced, remembering a particularly tedious exchange he once had with Martha about bringing what she had called "junk" into the house.

The feedback encouraged Aki to continue. "So every time I asked, he'd make a promise. It started as 'maybe in a few months,' then it became, 'maybe next summer,' and that grew to one particular birthday or the next." Her voice traveled steadily to a deeper place. "It took me a very long time to translate all those affirmatives into 'No;' but once I finally did, I stopped asking, and he didn't have to lie to me about it anymore."

Yusei traded his view of the landscape for Aki. Her expression was now sculpted in ice, her stare as intense as if she was reading her words from something she had written far off in the distance.

"When I got older, I'd look at the ocean and wish that Satellite really was as desolate as they'd say. I'd wish that there was no one there so I could just swim my way over and never be able to hurt anyone again, instead of having to find an even farther-away place to run away to. Of course, I knew that idea was as impractical as a senator taking his daughter to a place that everyone in the city hated; but the thought of drowning felt more like a chance than a threat, and it scared me to realize that. So I stopped thinking of anything when I looked at the ocean. I just felt like it was empty."

A collective weight lowered itself into both of their chests.

Aki's lips twitched into a smile, taking a turn that showed just as much haste and effort as a turn that she would take on her D-Wheel whenever the road twisted. She became locked in a dispute with her own eyes, forcing her sight back up to the sky as it persistently tried to anchor itself to her grounded feet. She spelled out everything she wanted to express in her head and hoped that the general idea would manifest itself in his. _Say something else. Please_. _I said too much. Just act like what I said was nothing. Please. Just this once._

The ringing that Aki's voice had left hanging in the air was pushed out to sea by Yusei's sigh like a message in a bottle. "I know now what a naïve thought it was, but growing up here before the bridge was built, I couldn't imagine that anyone in the city could ever be suffering. Neo Domino seemed like some kind of promised land compared to Satellite. I saw them as black and white."

Aki shivered at the acknowledgement of her past from someone other than herself. "Instead of all the different shades of gray?" she interjected, wringing out a fraction of a laugh to counteract her bleak response.

"No," he answered, refusing to play along with the levity she was trying to assume; however, he immediately criticized the severity that had been present in his voice. He looked back out in front of him, regarding both the city's neon signature imprinted in the distance and the nearby signals flashing in the harbor. "Instead of the colors," he concluded, exuding much more softness.

The atmosphere around them fell back into the open arms of silence. Yusei found himself growing eager for her to speak, his hopes placed on hearing a genuine quality resonate in her voice again past the veneer she had applied to it. "Do you know what I mean?" he prodded gently, turning back to her.

Aki swallowed hard as the weight on her heart made a climb towards the surface. The beads of color in her vision blurred into translucent spheres then returned to definition through the effort of a few blinks. "Yeah, I do," she replied succinctly. Her hand had stopped halfway up in its mission to hide her face, but she played it off by casually beating back another lock of hair. The winds were barreling through with more and more zeal.

"Care to sit?" Yusei offered, taking a seat near her feet on the pier's wooden floor and holding up a hand as an invitation to follow him down. She accepted the hand somewhat bashfully as she lowered herself off of her feet, an undeniable grace present even in her wary descent. The ocean soon spritzed the back of her neck through the bars, which set themselves dismally against her spine. She leaned forward instead, resting her forearms on the shallow cushion of her thighs. The temptation to inch herself closer to Yusei bit at the back of her thoughts, but she wrestled with it tenaciously. Still, her eyes were fastened to his side, studying his hand. It tensed under her gaze.

"Where did—"

"Is there—"

"Where did that come from?" crashed headfirst into "Is there something wrong?" and the cacophonous collision sent both riders reeling back into a reappraisal of what they each had been planning to say. They exchanged information through a quiet stare; and after some deliberation, Yusei elected Aki as the next person to speak, casting his vote with a nod. Aki's shoulders rose as she inhaled a quick morsel of the salty air.

"I noticed that you have a scar on your hand. I was just wondering how it got there," Aki stated, her voice shrinking under the possibility of trespassing on sacred ground.

It took Yusei a few seconds to locate any scar, time and gloves having estranged him from the exceptional details of the back of his hand. "This one?" he assumed, a finger of his opposite hand moving like a chess piece to a pale crack of a line diverting southwest from the center of his hand towards his palm.

"Actually, I meant this one." Aki set her finger near a smaller, pinker line closer to his jacket sleeve that stopped short of peaking out from underneath the leather. "But the one you're pointing to looks like it was worse." Her finger cruised down to the more striking scar, and she felt puckered and gathered grooves in its surrounding skin before she removed her hand from him altogether, astounded by her own audacity.

"Probably, since I can't even remember how I got the one you pointed out," Yusei mused with a humble smile. "But this one…" His voice suddenly picked up a puff of accomplishment as he held his hand up in display. "This one came from one of the first engines I ever built. I installed a fan made from scrap metal in order to prevent overheating and the blades were…well…sharp. And trying to make adjustments to another part of the engine…something was loose, I think, probably a screw…before the fan stopped turning was not a good idea."

Aki clasped her hand to her mouth in horror, air audibly passing through a narrow gap between her fingers.

"Granted, I was very young when I made that mistake, but I learned an important lesson," he added.

"Patience?" Aki speculated, the word both taking on and losing letters as it pushed itself through the barrier of flesh and bone before it.

"Exactly," he confirmed, his countenance alight with what Aki could identify only as pride. She decided to hold up her right index finger, calling attention to a petite and peachy kiss of a slash that ran across her fingertip.

"Paper cut. Much less impressive, but it proves that one must be careful when dueling." Her finger bobbed mightily, tipping the balance of her unsteady smirk.

Seconds dragged themselves through the dense hush that labored to hold itself over the pier. Yusei was the first to chuckle, but Aki quickly crumbled after him, her cheeks ailing from the ache of stifled laughter. The chemistry of their mixing echoes stewed in the atmosphere, spilling unnamed elements into both the water and the air.

Reclaiming the basic motor functions that had abandoned her in laughter, Aki angled her arm to show the drops of cool rainbow fading under the skin of her elbow. "Not to mention the bruises from Riding Duels. On that first day of practice with my D-Wheel, I was surprised I could stay on long enough to fall off again!"

Yusei nodded. "That's how it goes. I remember _my_ first ride. What Jack, Crow, and I made wasn't exactly a D-Wheel, but it had wheels and moved, and that was good enough for us." His voice still rippled with the timbre of a laugh.

"That doesn't sound like it ended well," Aki remarked, her left eyebrow rising. Her right eyebrow followed forthwith as Yusei began to pry off his jacket.

"I'll never forget that crash. Neither will my shoulder." Indented into his left shoulder was the ghost of a lengthy gash, bordered in pastel shades of plum and merlot.

"What—how—"

"Riding in the junkyard was also not a good idea."

"I… can tell!" Aki affirmed as she tried to fathom how the boy could be so oblivious to his own bad luck.

Yusei shrugged as he pulled the jacket back over his arms. "It healed, just like the others. Like that." He gestured towards a silken lilac scrape that branched out from her bruises and traced the bone of her forearm, underlining the mark of the Claw. He recognized the style of scuff as the product of sliding against pavement, although he was surprised that her suit had not softened the blow. "That looks like it's almost gone."

"That one is different." Aki brought the full volume of her stare down upon her arm. "It isn't…recent. It's from a much earlier time."

"It is? Is there a story to it?"

"There…there is something…but…" _It's not the same with me as it is with you, _she thought. _My scars aren't all trophies._ Aki realized just how much she had been neglecting the secrets she carried. She raised her head up to face the sky. Its black sheet was riddled with white puncture marks, the stars filing themselves into fine points as the ghostly radiance of the urban lights began to pass in the late hour. She cursed her own carelessness at letting her arm be exposed. There was no justifying a lie or silence now. "I had just ended a duel, and I was…I was running away after the diversion I'd created. I didn't want anyone else challenging me, and I certainly didn't want anyone catching up to me after the damage I'd done. I ran until my legs were burning and I couldn't breathe anymore behind my mask, and then I ducked into the nearest alleyway. I…tripped, and landed on my arm…and slid a few feet in until I hit the wall."

"This would have been when…" Yusei's memory wound backwards through months that felt like centuries to a history that felt like fiction.

"When I was the Black Rose Witch." Aki smiled without even a pretense of cheer and again lowered her gaze. "Had you forgotten about that time?"

"No. That would be forgetting how I met you."

"Oh. That's true." Aki felt her cheeks turn as red as her leather suit and her walls of her throat clench just as tight. In her mind, she was already watching her legs carry her to her D-Wheel and secure her to its seat as its motor drowned out any more talk and powered her escape; a fantasy and plan that she hated as soon as she conceived it. She was sick of thinking that way.

"We don't talk about that much." Yusei remarked, echoing a truth Aki had heard before at the back of her thoughts.

"Should we?"

"If it's on your mind, then yes. But if it makes you feel uncomfortable, then no." His lack of preference gave Aki nothing on which to base her decision except her own preference.

"…And if it's both?"

"Then it's up to you."

"I'm not sure what there is to say that my father didn't tell you or that you didn't see for yourself," Aki stated in the hopes of keeping things painless.

With no words to offer in return, Yusei settled on another numb silence and left her words untouched, making the echoes of her own voice feel sharp and fresh in her head even as time passed in ever-widening increments. In one single shared second, Yusei's eyes fell upon Aki and Aki's eyes darted away. Her arms folded into each other, synching at the wrists and connecting her fists with her knees. It only drew more attention to her arm. The crimson Claw, drawn up in a shade almost black by the lighting, was still manifest on her skin, as it had been for years before Yusei had ever seen her face or spoken her name. He admitted to himself that it was a fascinating thing to analyze, as he had spent countless hours of his life staring at his own mark—before and after it changed—and meditating on its significance. The bold lines of the Claw flowed and curled with an organic quality somewhat foreign to him and his affinity for the mechanical. It was elegant and menacing, yet modest and cordial. He smiled internally and resolved that it was quintessentially Aki. At this point he realized that his staring was borderline inappropriate, but something about the skin around her Sign urged him to examine it even more closely, eyes narrowing. It was more than a shadow, or a discoloration, but something more defined that he had never been near enough to notice before.

Aki knew the pressure of eyes on her almost as well as she knew the pressure of her own hand clamped on her arm. She would have initiated the latter to alleviate the former, but she recognized that it was too late.

His hand met her arm in a melancholy hello. Her heart kicked off a nervous dance. She shifted in place. His finger struck a nerve as it appraised the collection of faint beige and mauve scratches hand-scrawled across and through the lines of her mark as if the symbol was a dreamcatcher or a web. "What… are these?"

The air had turned balmy in the respite of wind, but chills still spread like wildfire along Aki's skin. Her tongue set itself against the back of her front teeth, poised and ready to form the word, "Nothing," but she ended it there. She ended everything there, including the fight she was putting up. She could see in his eyes and feel in her own that she was losing. "…You know."

"I'm… afraid that I do, but I don't understand."

"I told you, back during the Fortune Cup, before our match, that I hated everyone who bore this mark…I had just met you. Who else do you think I really knew with this mark besides me?"

His lack of a response only caused more thoughts to charge through her head. It was a speed like before, like when she was on the road, and she felt like if she did not drive herself through it that she was going to crash. Her mouth kept moving.

"I told you a lot in that duel. I don't know why. It was more than I ever told Divine, or even myself. I mean… I even told you that I _hated_ myself, like it was nothing. I didn't know who I was in those moments, just that I was in pain. The Black Rose Witch or Aki Izayoi, I didn't know _what_ part of me demanded that I explain myself to you." Here she was again, explaining herself to him. It was beyond her. There was something about Yusei that did this to her; he had some sort of power. In their first duel, there had been just a single tear rolling down her masked face, and her voice had been steady, yet he had still known she was crying. It was scary. She refused to say it now and did not know if she ever would, but he had scared her in that duel more than she had scared the spectators. "I know I made you think that I enjoyed destruction, and—"

"Aki…"

She shook her head. "—And you were right, I did enjoy destruction. I wanted to destroy myself. I-I wanted to be rid of this mark, and it wasn't just a wish. It was a goal. So the scars are still there, a-and now they're what I wish would go away. I like to pretend that the Black Rose Witch and I were two different people… I-I always did, but… when I look at my arm, it's the same arm, the same arm that… Except, I don't hate this mark anymore. I promise. It's just that sometimes, when I'm alone, I think about everything and I… I can't help but…"

"Aki."

Her mouth opened, and that was it. She could not form any more words. Taking a fatigued breath, she responded by meeting Yusei's eyes. They seemed so clear and intent that she could almost see her reflection in them, if not for the fog that began simmering in her own vision.

"You're doing it right now."

Aki reached up with her right hand, brushing off Yusei in the process, and felt a teardrop squish into her fingertips. She flicked away at it and ended up smearing it across her cheek, content to let the remains soak into her skin. Another followed, falling down her face and off the edge of her jaw in too much of a rush for her to catch it. She pressed the back of her hand against her eye as if she could will her lacrimal glands to shut off like faucets. She felt liquid start a slow crawl down her arm.

"I'm sorry. This is hard to talk about," she relayed from behind her arm, giving a rationalization because _she_ needed one.

"It's hard to listen to," Yusei related as he watched another tear drip from the eye he could still see. Aki then closed her eyes and spread her fingers out over her erubescent face, hoping to mask whatever was left to hide. Her head slumped forward.

A slight shifting sound reached Aki's ears only moments before she felt hands station themselves at the high and low points of her back. Heat flashed in the air around her as her body was brought closer to his, and she moved her right hand from her face to his jacket in unconscious acceptance. Her chin now on his shoulder, she faced the expanse of night behind him with open, burning eyes.

"If you don't want me to see you cry, then I won't look."

The spheres of color in her vision streaked into a white-hot light. The walls inside her shook as she tried to permit only a few sobs past them, and when she shut her eyes, they all crumbled.

"I…" Aki was painfully aware of the thrashing of her shoulders, and of the sharp tears her eyes were pushing into the deep blue leather of Yusei's jacket, even though she knew it was too thick for them to seep through. Her head caved into the hollow of his neck, and he secured it there, his fingers dipping into the maroon tufts of her hair. "The reason that I… even brought up scars…is that I saw the scar on your hand, and I thought that…it might have been caused by my powers," she muttered, tasting salt on her lips as she spoke and leaving fingerprints of breath in his shirt and skin. She thought of pulling herself away but in contrast held tightly to his sleeve. Any words of consolation that had been stringing themselves together into phrases in Yusei's head were scattered like beads cascading to the floor.

As the fervor ebbed away from her heart and lingered only in her clenching fists, she opened her eyes then tugged her sight away from the small pocket of darkness between her face and his collarbone. After a particularly impassioned sniffle, she was ambushed suddenly by the desire to be rocked in his arms, but she laughed it off aloud on account of its sheer childishness. Yusei interpreted this abrupt outburst as a signal to let her go, and following his cue she lifted herself from the frame of his chest with a gentle push. The two then subsided back into postures of leisure, Aki's legs even stretched out in front of her now instead of folded underneath her. Her eyes were still lacquered in her remaining but stationary tears, but they were emphatically shimmering. Yusei mused to himself that her new smile set well into the curve of her face, like a component fitted into its proper place in a machine's assembly. It was something pleasing to see.

"Is…there…is there something on my face?" Aki questioned, her quizzical look formed in response to his scrutinous one.

Yusei cleared his throat, which was still lukewarm and buzzing from having her mouth so nearby. "There _is _something…right there," he replied, tapping his left cheek as a substitution for directly pointing at hers. Aki tentatively coaxed the teardrop that was frozen in mid-descent down her cheek onto her finger and off of her face as if it were an insect, then shook it off of her hand as if it were just as pesky. Yusei nodded, but then positioned his pointer finger underneath his other eye. "And there."

Aki's hand crept up inches and then halted. "No, I think you have something there," she quipped coyly, suspecting—and now she had said it, hoping—that he was trying to elicit such a repartee.

Yusei chuckled, although the emotion in his reaction was more visible than audible. At any rate, she had guessed correctly. That was as good of a reason as any to smile wider and laugh along. The topic of reasons was one that presently stood in the forefront of her mind, for she now only had one question left to ask, and it was one that had sparked in her thoughts much earlier in the night. She figured that at this point, the difficult answers were behind them.

"Yusei, what exactly were we supposed to be doing out here?" Aki asked, mirth still tickling her vocal chords.

Yusei shrugged his orange-padded shoulders and exhaled heartily. His sudden edginess was as contagious as a yawn or a cold; Aki was prepared to ask if he was all right, but then he spoke. "Jack, Crow, and I…the three of us grew up together. Rua and Ruka come to the garage every day after school and tell me about their day, usually both of them at once. You're the one friend that seems the farthest away, so…"

"…So, what we've been doing." _Talking, _Aki thought past the blush nipping at her cheeks. _Just the two of us._

"Do you agree? That is, that it's something we should be doing?" Yusei had garnered some doubts about his plan. If he could have developed the right method of articulating it in the time he was allotted, he would have apologized about making her cry. His strategist capabilities were no help now. It was an entirely different kind of move than what he was used to initiating in a duel.

Aki's eyes started on his increasingly pensive expression then strolled out once again to the sea. The sight of extravagant lights that had welcomed them was now whittled into a flicker of amber here and there, and the midnight blue of the sky was now an impending cornflower. Her eyes ended up back at the pier, settling on the floorboards and the two sets of feet placed atop them. Her red leather heel swung mischievously at Yusei's nearby taupe boot and made contact, knocking his foot sideways. "Yes," she resolved contently, and her smile sunk deeper into her face—her pink lips stretching and disappearing into the crease—as he swung back. "There is something else that we technically should be doing right now, though."

"What?" Yusei asked.

"Sleeping. It's quite late." There was not the slightest whisper of a complaint in her voice, only her grin.

"True. But do you feel like leaving?" While it was a sincere question, it was asked lightly instead of gravely.

"No way."

"Then I suppose we're sleeping out here tonight," Yusei declared.

"Right here?"

"Sure."

"Good, because my legs are already asleep and I wasn't looking forward to getting up," she disclosed with the straightest face she could muster. Yusei sounded off one unbridled syllable of a laugh as he moved a few feet away from the railing and lay back instead onto the smooth surface of parallel planks. Aki untied the sleeves from her waist and slipped them back over the limbs they were sewn for, opting for the slim cushion of her riding suit over the flat mattress of wood. As one last task she brought out her cell phone, shut it off, then returned it to where she been storing it: deep in the bust of her dress. A glance to the left showed Yusei looking quite conspicuously in the opposite direction, and her cheeks once again flared. She also settled in at a distance safely far from the side of the pier despite its bars, but the space she left between herself and Yusei was considerably less cautionary. The stars had finally decided to leave for the night, but she could still picture their phosphorescent silhouettes in the sky past the outlines of downy clouds that were splitting cracks in the high ceiling of blue. The shade of blue was very familiar and significant in her mind, although she was unsure as to why. Aki sighed. "Thank you, by the way."

"For not making you get up?"

"No, more than that." Aki shook her head and heard the swish of her hair against the wood. "If not for you, I probably wouldn't be here."

"This place _is_ hard to find."

"That's not what I'm trying to say."

"It isn't?"

"…Never mind. I'll try again some other time."

"Okay."

Aki closed her eyes, which were still as soaked as the posts suspending the pier above the water. The darkness behind her eyelids filled with reflections on instances she could never forget, with the good overpowering the bad in an asymmetry she never could have foreseen years ago. She ran through the scenario over and over again in her imagination of herself knowing the perfect words to express what she meant and saying them to him, although the setting changed with every new second. It might be on this very structure, with a sunset; it might be on a park bench in the afternoon, in the rain or after it; it might even be in the garage, on a night like this, with no one else around, with everyone else sleeping…

"I've got to admit," Yusei said after silence had almost dropped Aki into sleep. The tether keeping her anchored in the waking world snapped her back into full consciousness with such unforgiving celerity that her mind got whiplash.

"Yeah?" she prodded, beginning to suspect another dead-end statement like some of the gems from earlier.

"There weren't many girls around when I was growing up in Satellite, so I don't know much about them."

"Oh, I think you've figured it out," she casually informed him, the sentence making it to her mouth without any preliminary thought.

"I have?"

Their eyes managed to meet again despite the clumsy tango each pair was performing across the stage of their surroundings, fumbling to stay open. Aki came very close to pointing at his eyes, automatic courtesy thwarting her subconscious attempt to embarrass herself. _That_ was where she had seen that blue before.

"Just so you know, I'm… not entirely sure what I meant by that."

"That's all right," Yusei assured. He grinned as Aki yawned in an almost feline manner before feeling the same reflex nudge at his throat.

"Mm-hmm," Aki responded absently, her upper eyelids having fallen as conclusively as guillotines to their rims. She had slept before on the streets, during that first and last hell she ever wanted to impose on herself, but being out in the open was only one of many differences between that experience and this. In a more present state of mind, she might have been able to define them all, but the desire to dwell had become antiquated, sitting now in a back row on a high shelf holding old bad habits. Now she wanted to linger in the present and perhaps even ease into the future, the morning…with the right company…

* * *

><p>There was light beating down onto her eyelids from the outside world, turning her vision scarlet where it had been black as she felt what seemed like the entire ocean rise from below to smack itself against her face. She quickly reasoned that it could not have been the ocean, however, for she tasted no salt as she hacked and sputtered to expel the unwelcome water from her nose and mouth. Voices chimed in like the light from places above and around her, voices she recognized.<p>

"Geez, did you have to wake them up like _that_?" she heard in a voice that was decidedly Crow's.

Aki sat up and opened her eyes—regrettably giving drops of water access to her eyeballs—to find Jack holding an empty plastic water bottle upside down and scowling in what was thankfully not her general direction. She looked to her left and saw Yusei wiping away the excess water leaking onto his face that his bangs had collected in the initial torrent. It took her that long to realize that what she had felt gently weighted against her body was not the leftover haze of a deep sleep, but his jacket.

"Yeah, I wanted to poke them while they were still out!" Rua lamented, hanging onto the railing with two hands and one foot while Ruka stood near him and simply shook her head.

"The goal was to wake them up, and I did," Jack justified.

Crow rolled his eyes and cut off any further argument with Jack, shifting his focus to Yusei and Aki. "And you two, recklessly sleeping out here in a public place after just disappearing in the middle of the night! I'd expect something like that maybe from him, but not sensible people like you."

"Wha—"

"You don't have to be so hard on them, Crow," Ruka started, in turn stopping Jack from retaliating. "It's not like they were doing anything bad, they were just on a date."

All the water on which Aki could choke had been effectively discharged, but a fit of coughing still sprung up all over again in her throat. She felt a hand give her a few firm pats on the back, and with the knowledge that Yusei was the only one close enough to perform such action, she coughed harder.

Crow sighed, thinking to himself about how much the youngest members of their group still had to learn about life. "Anyway, at least we found them, so let's head back. I don't know about you guys, but I could go for some breakfast right about now."

"Yeah!" Rua cheered, leaping impressively from the bars and getting a head start back to the cluster of vehicles at the inland edge of the pier, with Ruka gaining on him by the second. Crow stretched and flexed his arms behind his head and left them there as he walked away, and Jack followed after loudly crushing the trash in his hands, muttering something about how thirsty he was.

Aki gathered up the jacket from her lap and gingerly held it out towards Yusei, who accepted it with a friendly nod before standing. He tossed the dark blue garment back over his sleeveless shirt and walked off, as taciturn as ever. Aki stood and pulled her zipper up to its proper position. She stared for one more moment with her fingertips kissing the metal of the railing, gazing at her friends like they were city lights or stars, and smiled.


End file.
